St. Machine

RF - East Coast - 30s

[idontwantsurgery-deactivated201]

When Adrienne Rich said “our minds and bodies are inseparable in this life, and when we allow our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger”

[chemicalico]

me and the no one i pulled by doing nothing

[midnightssea]

literally….the idea that having your father’s last name is ~just as bad~ as having your husband’s last name has always been wacky as hell to me because regardless of where it came from, that’s the name I’ve been called since birth. it’s not any less “my” name than it is my brother’s name just because I’m female. I reject the idea that I don’t truly belong to my family of origin just because of my gender. If anything, that reinforces the idea of daughters as expendable possessions to be sold into marriage.

and it’s not that there’s no valid critique to be made of patronymic traditions, but it should be obvious why many women prefer to keep the identity they were born with instead of taking on their husband’s identity upon marriage. It’s almost like we have decades of life experiences, relationships, and self-conception tied to our names.

[rapidlydecayingcorpse]

i feel like people aren't getting how dire ai is. we are running out of drinkable water. our brains aren't engaging as much with what we see and hear. people near data centers don't get clean water and experience electricity blackouts. it's being used to make pornography of underaged people and women. it often just lies. it affirms everything. it lies. it has made people kill themselves. it lies for gods sake. and people act as if im dramatic for being staunchly against it. 'now i KNOOW you hate ai and whatever, but look at this cute video' this isn't me being a new age puritan about internet videos, this is about the fucking earth and our future living on this planet. people are suffering now, people will suffer more, and my friends and parents will roll their eyes and think im annoying for despising ai so explicitly. we need to wake up because we cannot live like this

[uncahier]

[roycohn]

being a woman with a career makes you a fascist girlboss, can't advocate for sending rapists to prison without being told you're a cop apologist and instead of supporting the carceral state you should just engage in "restorative justice" with the person who raped you, criticizing the multibilliondollar industries that exist to tell women they're ugly and then sell them a fix to make them hot again makes you "not a girls' girl" and a "pick me," any criticism of the concept of patriarchy is terf rhetoric and if you get labeled a terf well then you should just straight up kill yourself (even though you believe trans women are women and fail to see how talking about MEN has anything to do with that), it's fine to just use slurs with your whole chest these days. hate to say it but i actually miss the days when beyonce dancing in front of a sign that said "FEMINIST" was groundbreaking headline news

[dramaticbucket]

OP even repeated the cult mantra and is still getting called a terf in the notes lmao. Good post other than that. How dare women have any criticism of something that gives men erections and money!

[mbsdeactivated-deactivated20241]

in what way is wanting men who commit sadistic crimes against women and children to not be allowed to hurt more people "reifying white supremacist patriarchy" what the hell is wrong with you? "violence is a manifestation of systems of oppression" okay if that was true there'd be a female rapist on every corner. I think you people just genuinely do not give a shit about women and children and will place the welfare of actual literal predators over any of their victims. "exceptionalising rape focuses myopically on patriarchy as the only system of oppression" the only time any of you actually acknowledge the existence of patriarchy is when you're mockingly trying to downplay the sheer brutality of it. genuinely keeps me up at night the fact that so many people who sympathise with male rapists and pedos have access to and power over female victims. this is just MRA rhetoric dressed up in woke speak. and y'all lap it up everytime.

[thevastnessof]

it’s actually quite easy to take over a small local government group if you really want to, bc if you volunteer consistently people will just put you in charge of whatever. I’m now one of like three people at a nature preserve making official decisions about trails, putting in a prairie, and designing a series of illustrations for a storybook trail etc., and it’s just because last summer I started coming over once a week to help the naturalist out for a couple hours. Mine now. you too can steal an organization and shape it to your will 🫵

[nobrashfestivity]

Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab Shells Stereomicroscope

[itdoobielikethat]

Breasts aren't "ruining" your "aesthetic." Clothing is meant to serve your body, not the other way around. Surgically altering your body for a piece of fabric is fucking insane.

[its-terf-or-nothin]

[kittyit]

who has FEMALES USE COOPERATION AS A WEAPON. image

[kittyit]

[kittyit]

[dasfeministmermaid]

Females, use cooperation as a weapon

[seagullgal]

so hard to be sex positive in a "women and even men should be able to healthily masturbate and enjoy physical pleasure" kinda way while also being very very anti sex industry is hard sometimes.

Ahh but porn has always existed!! Look at cave paintings! Okay. Masturbate to cave paintings. I really want you to masturbate to cave paintings. If it's the same thing, you should have no issues masturbating to cave paintings. I'm dead serious when I say I have no issues with anybody masturbating to cave paintings, or even written smut or anything that doesn't rely on the rape of real people and profiting off of it. I'd be fine with hentai if so much of it didn't try to up the shock factor as much as possible to get people hooked on various fetishes.

People have masturbated forever, and they didn't need HD violent videos to do so. You can do it with your mind, or a nice lil story, I promise. Make your own horny cave painting, idgaf

[the-pink-economy-crit]

This is exactly the distinction that gets lost in the "discourse." Being anti-industry isn't about being anti-pleasure or anti-human nature; it’s about being anti-commodity.

​The "it’s always existed" argument is such a lazy reach. There is a massive structural chasm between a cave painting and a multi-billion dollar tech industry that uses predatory algorithms to keep people scrolling through increasingly extreme content. One is a human expression; the other is a profit-driven machine that relies on the financial desperation of real people.

​You can be 100% in favor of people having healthy, liberated sex lives while still recognizing that a massive, unregulated industry built on the extraction of labor from vulnerable populations is a net negative for society.

Promoting imagination or ethical, non-human-based media isn't "puritanical" it's just asking for a world where someone's survival isn't tied to being recorded for a stranger's subscription fee.

[antiporn-activist]

If porn was required for masturbation, that means everyone used have to visit those five specific caves to do it.

[nicenormalwitch]

I think the idea the female liberation comes entirely from personal choice is stupid and short sighted. I think there's a ton of personal choices that a woman can make that will improve her life in a number of ways, but not every woman is going to exclusively make choices that you personally agree with and many times women who want better lives make "bad" choices so she can experience "good" outcomes.

A woman who wears makeup and heels at work because she won't get promoted unless she does isn't a class traitor. She's a female in a male supremacist society doing what she thinks is best to survive and at a certain point you have to decide if female liberation is for all women or only pure women.

Women aren't oppressed because we choose oppression, women are oppressed because men choose to oppress us.

I know that there are a lot of women who will vehemently disagree with me when I say this, but there needs to be a space in discussions about female liberation for all females, not just pure females.

There needs to be space for females who transition, females who practice religion, gender conforming females, anorexic females, het partnered females, female who choose sex work despite theoretically having other options, females with lives you don't understand who make choices you despise, because it's our liberation on the line too.

You don't have to agree with us, but you have to let us speak. Our lives matter and we're trying our best in a world that hates us. If you silence every woman who doesn't live exactly how you want her to live and doesn't make every choice you think you would make in her circumstance your feminism isn't for women, it for you and only you and you cannot choose your way to liberation; you can only isolate yourself.

Because that's exactly what will happen, once you kick all the impure women out, you will be the only woman left and you will be alone.

[rad-octopus]

I agree with you that oppression is not chosen. We don't get to choose the zeitgeist of our time and its influence on us. But I think there's nuance here, and there is a difference between disagreeing with a woman's patriarchy-compliant choices and saying she shouldn't have a space in feminism.

When you are talking about feminism and discussing these things with other women, you (general you, not you specifically, I'm trying to disagree not be accusatory) have to be intellectually honest that certain choices are not made in a vacuum, are more likely to be chosen because you've been conditioned into those choices, because you are rewarded for making those choices. The trouble I have is when women are unwilling to admit that and says she chooses those things fully for herself ("I shave because it feels good", "I wear makeup for me!", etc). There is a difference between disagreement and saying someone isn't welcome, and we have to be able to disagree. That's how we grow and refine our feminism. I get to disagree with someone who is making choices that are harming other women and still think feminism should be for her, too.

But making societal change is not easy. It is not pleasant, and I think we do each other a disservice to pretend it is. I do get to disagree with a woman if her actions are taking us farther from a world where women are liberated. I do get to disagree with women who wear makeup to get a promotion. I understand there's a societal cost to not wearing makeup; I live it because I don't wear makeup. She's making an individual choice to comply with a systemic problem, and that doesn't solve anything, and it doesn't make things better for the women around her. It reinforces it.

Despite my disagreement, feminism absolutely should still benefit that woman, and her experiences are important to feminist discussion, and she should have a space in feminism. Disagreeing with her choice doesn't negate those things. If disagreement feels like she's being told she doesn't belong, then I have to ask what exactly she was expecting feminism to be, complete acceptance of any and all choices just because a woman made them? That's not how we get shit done. We don't make change by going with the flow, because women have been going with the flow for millennia and it's gotten us jack fucking shit.

What if instead of wearing makeup to get a promotion, she joined with other women in the company to show HR that this is a problem of talent leaving the company because of makeup. What if she joined with other women to make their own company and set up hiring and promotion practices that account for a beauty bias and counteracts it? Those actions benefit the women around her. That liberates women from needing to wear makeup to get a promotion. Many women can't do that, and I'm not saying disagreeing with her about wearing makeup means that I'm expecting her to take those actions or else she's kicked out of feminism.

We're all together on a sinking ship. No matter what the women around me are doing, I'm still gonna work to plug holes and bail out water, and I'm not gonna toss her off the ship if she doesn't help me. But I reserve the right to point out when some women are sitting on their hands watching the water pour in because that's what they were taught good little girls do.

[closet-keys]

reactionaries pretending to be progressive are always like "what if we don't change material conditions and we all just learn to be content with the way things are? isn't that the true revolution?"

[uncertainwaters]

i love when people try to compel me to be nicer to men when all things considered i have been and continue to be shockingly nice, much more so than i have any obligation or desire to be. i do not call for the same violence that was done to me or is called for against me, i speak always with respect for the interior life of who i am speaking with, i do not use the slurs or vocabulary of the violent men you conflate me with. i am being nice. what you are actually asking for is that i be obedient. and that is not going to happen again.

[lettucefem]

I think one of the most insidious things about our current era of patriarchy is how much we are bombarded with women who appear to choose their own objectification, enjoying their own objectification and selling it as confidence and fun. The message being that any discomfort with patriarchy is prudish and unfeminine and underconfident. That this discomfort must come from our own ugliness and shame, something to hide and be insecure about, and that criticism of objectification is criticism of women ourselves. That we’re jealous and mean. Men are almost completely taken out of the picture- as executives, as photographers, as directors and consumers of our bodies and sexuality. The objectification of women is done by women, to women, and any repercussions will fall onto women. We are entirely self contained whilst men are free to watch from outside and consume our sexuality regardless.

[laundryandtaxes]

I think shifting my understanding of dysphoria from something I "have" to a set of feelings that I experience has been really fundamental and important for managing that dysphoria. This for me has meant that I no longer see myself as a person suffering from a condition, but I experience flare ups in dysphoria the same way I experience any other negative emotion, which is that I sit in it and it is uncomfortable and maybe it causes me some pain but that's fine, and I note the feeling and ask myself what brought that feeling on and then I move on and do my best not to focus unduly on it. I think many dysphoric women especially have traded the constant self watching that is so central to how women are forced to do femininity, for the constant self watching that dysphoria can encourage, and in both cases it is not healthy to be constantly concerned with and trying to actively alter how you are perceived.